ASPEN — As Chris Froome's star continues rising in the cycling universe, a couple of images will never leave his memory. One came last month. He's circling the cobblestones as the sun sets on the Champs-Élysées and his first Tour de France win.

The other wasn't viewed by millions around the world or tens of thousands in Paris. It's of him pedaling his bike on the outskirts of Kenya's national game parks. He was viewed by one.

"Normally (it's) with a car behind me just in case I did run into something that could take me off my bike," Froome said.

Tour de France winner Chris Froome grew up cycling in Kenya where, he says, "Bikes are not meant to be on the roads." (Bryn Lennon, Getty Images Europe)

He smiled shyly, a frequent image the world saw from the podiums around France. He sat in a conference room Sunday in Aspen, the start for Monday's third annual USA Pro Challenge. He has already declared he won't win. The emotional and physical beating, not to mention the demands of a new Tour de France winner, took too much of a toll to win a month later at the highest altitude of his career.

But in an exclusive interview with The Denver Post, a relaxed Froome talked about growing up in Africa, how a background fairly unique to cycling helped turn him into the greatest cyclist in the world today.

Off the beaten path is great for traveling but not always for cycling.

"The roads are terrible," said Froome, 28. "I wouldn't recommend people to go up and ride their road bikes in Kenya. Bikes are not meant to be on the roads. But the mountain biking is fantastic. You can go right up into the tea and coffee plantations up in the highlands. You can descend the great Rift Valley."

His mother's parents immigrated to Kenya from Gloucestershire, England, to raise a crop farm. His mother was a physical therapist in Nairobi.

He was always on his bike, exploring new roads, visiting friends and shops.

"Kenya, being a Third World country, from a young age your eyes are open to the real world," said Froome, who now lives in Monaco. "I'd like to think growing up there taught me to stand on my own two feet, make my own decisions about what I wanted to be."

When he was 12, his mother took him to his first bike race, where he met David Kinjah, a dreadlocked Kenyan rider who took him under his wing. They mountain biked together and Kinjah even let him stay in his village of Kikuyu for weeks at a time. Froome learned Swahili and some Kikuyu.

Kinjah saw something in Froome. It wasn't just cycling prowess.

The demands on his body and time after the Tour de France have taken a toll on Chris Froome, who says he won't win the Pro Challenge. (Daniel Petty, The Denver Post)

"He was like one of us, our brother," Kinjah told the BBC. "He was just funny and happy, a white boy who accepted our village and ate our food."

At 14 he went to boarding school in South Africa, where his father had previously moved. Whereas in Kenya, "I grew up feeling people didn't look at skin color," post-Apartheid South Africa in the 1990s still seemed segregated. Even white English children played apart from the white Afrikaans.

But in South Africa he met Robbie Nilsen, an attorney who started an Under-23 team. At the time, Froome was getting smoked in bike races.

"They were all 100-kilometer races and predominantly flat," Froome said. "I wasn't getting any results. I can't sprint at all."

Nilsen had him doing six-hour training rides and riding in the 5,751-foot altitude around Johannesburg. In 2007, at 22, he landed a contract with the South African-sponsored team, Barloworld, and was flying at Europe's sea level.

"Being my first year and put in to all the bigger classics — Liege, Amstel, Fleche, Paris-Roubaix and straight into the Tour after that — was a lot to take in but I'm really glad I got that opportunity," he said.

Sky Pro Racing signed him in 2010 and in a year he took off: second in the 2011 Vuelta a Espana, second in Le Tour, then this year's hardware collection: Tour of Oman, Criterium International, Tour de Romandie, Criterium du Dauphine and, finally, France.

Now he wants to start a foundation to benefit young cyclists in Africa. He already has a willing audience. After he cruised across the finish line in Paris, Kinjah joined a group of Kenyans in the streets of Nairobi.

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